Jay Reatard: In Memoriam

The Jay Reatard band toured incessantly and developed into one of the best live bands in the country. Converts were either blown away by the show then blown away by the level of songwriting and massive hooks on Blood Visions, or the other way around. Regardless, after a slow start of six months to a year, things started happening for the band.

Stephen Pope: I think in the beginning we played the songs a lot slower; we were still learning to play together. As playing together got more comfortable, the energy went way up. Nobody was ever in a good mood while we played. A good mood wouldn't be very appropriate for a Jay Reatard show. The songs were mostly written out of anger and the various chemicals helped fuel that rage live. A show seemed boring without the rage. It felt like getting in a fight every night, which is pretty exhilarating.

The first label to get in contact was Universal Records. Universal seemed very interested and wined and dined us for a bit. I got to eat at Peter Luger's, which was awesome, and Jay puked it all up. After talking to Universal for a few months a few other labels popped up. Columbia chimed in for a bit and even asked Jay if he wanted to meet Rick Rubin. (He didn't.) The indies that wanted Jay were Fat Possum, Matador, and Kemado Records. Contrary to popular belief, and probably many of Jay's stories, the major labels never offered deals. Matador offered to do the singles series in 2008 before any deal was made for an LP. In the end it came down to being on Fat Possum or Matador. Jay was pretty settled on Fat Possum but at the last minute after a long, late-night conversation, Matador offered Jay a very large sum of money. Jay celebrated. Hard.

Gerard Cosloy (Matador Records co-owner): I purchased a copy of Blood Visions at Waterloo in late 2006. Roughly around the same time, Dave Martin had been playing the record in our NYC offices quite a bit, and [others] naturally took notice. I think all of us were only familiar with Jay's lengthy discography [and] family tree in passing until that point. We didn't see Jay play or meet him until 2007.

Lindsay Shutt (Graphic designer, girlfriend): Every day he was getting more and more attention from press, record labels. People from record labels really like to take you out and show you a wild time. They spend a lot of money on you, get you wasted. I felt like I was watching a movie the whole time. It was all very surreal. But I never thought the end would have turned out so bad.

Adam Shore (Jay Reatard's manager, Ex-Vice): I booked Jay to play our Vice Kills Texas party at SXSW in 2007. Jay was unhinged, head-butting and taunting Stephen [Pope], spitting on and leaping into the audience, doing his noise and feedback outro for "Let It All Go". Those industry shows always made him especially edgy, and that kind of stress makes him explode. After that SXSW show we sat on East 11th Street and talked. Everyone at Vice loved Blood Visions so much, and we wanted to see if he could do the follow-up record on our label. Jay told me he was already talking to a bunch of labels, and that people were offering him X amount of dollars-- a lot more than we could offer!

So I asked him if he had experience with contracts, if he knew what to ask for and expect from labels, and he admitted he was just making it up as he went along. At that point, even though he was 18 albums into his career, he had never signed a contract, never had a manager or a lawyer or a publicist or an A&R person or a booking agent. So I started walking him through the process, being a sounding board and answering his questions, and a little while later he asked me to manage him. He signed to Matador soon after.

Zac Ives: Jay was always really good about being organized and getting shit done. For recording sessions, everything would be set up before you got there. For tours there would be a tour book printed out with maps to each venue, guarantees, contacts. He knew his business was music-- and he took it all very seriously. For years he was his own manager, booking agent, PR agent, licensing rep, engineer, producer, A&R man, packaging guy-- he did it all. It's part of the reason he did ultimately get to the top, because he managed to do all that for himself. But because he didn't have money growing up, I think it took on a different meaning for him. He had no choice-- he never had a real stable home-- and he's been on his own since he was 15. This sense of self-preservation was necessary, but it would get in the way of things if he let it. He had to fight for himself and his business a lot, and so sometimes he put it above friendships and relationships and common sense. As long as you understood that about him everything would be fine and you'd make up the next day. But I think it was something he constantly struggled with.

Adam Shore: Jay had so much experience in music-- recording, manufacturing, distribution, booking shows, making merch. It was all so DIY. Once he linked up with the "proper" music industry he got obsessed with it-- reading books, poring over every word of his contracts, calling me at all hours of the night asking me for advice and reinforcement. Soon he did have a manager and a lawyer and a publicist and an A&R person and a booking agent. But working with people was always a challenge for Jay. He was so used to doing everything himself.

Lindsay Shutt: Jay would record all the time. When he wasn't touring he was either recording a song at home or working all day doing interviews, organizing tours. I'd come home from work and he'd have a song done. Before we lived in our house, he lived upstairs of his friend's house. It really blew my mind to see somebody make music with a sound so big in such a tiny little room.

Damian Abraham (Fucked Up): I first met Jay at the Vice Saves Texas party at SXSW in 2008, when we both played. I resisted Blood Visions when it first came out but by this point I had become a huge fan and was pumped to see them play and meet its infamous writer. I had no idea what to expect. The year before someone had flown Angry Angles up here to do two shows, and at the show in Montreal he cracked my friend in the head with the mic stand and knocked her out. So when I met Jay I was a little disarmed by this seemingly normal guy in front of me. When they played their set and he threw a full large beer can into someone's face, I understood the infamy part a little better.

Stephen Pope: I would lose Jay probably once or twice a tour, so we would have to cancel shows. The first genuinely scary time I had to deal with something as a tour manager was in Cologne, Germany. There was an apartment in the bar we were playing in and Jay got in several fights, got the cops called, and destroyed the upstairs apartment. He ripped bookcases off the walls, tore apart bunk beds, broke windows, and ripped apart the kitchen. When we tried to leave the owner of the bar had taken some of our gear and all of our merch and locked it in a closet. He was refusing to give us our stuff because of what Jay had done to his place. As I was trying to figure out what could be done to get our stuff back, Jay was behind me threatening to kill the guy. The man, in return, got very upset and almost started fighting Jay.

Gerard Cosloy: The combined forces of message board nonsense (not Termbo, mind you) and YouTube did a lot of damage in terms of making Jay come off like a cartoon. A handful of incidents never added up to the full sum of what he was about as a person or musician, and in some cases, he was totally blameless. At his last Austin show, Jay was ambushed by a couple of guys who jumped onstage and tried to beat him up (they failed, miserably). Felt like a copycat crime, to me. But I'm sure it was much more stressful for Jay than it was for us.

Zac Ives: He talked a lot about taking care of his family. It was a big deal for him to buy a house and a car. I think the money thing was still a struggle. I know he struggled with having too much free time and dealing with deadlines and expectations that came along with with stuff on the next level. But there were also lots of positives that came out of it: I remember him talking about meeting a kid that came to a record store show with his dad-- and this kid just loved Jay and his music. That ability to connect with a larger group of people meant a lot to him.

The other thing was just that he had created this self-perpetuating public vision of himself-- that he always had to be nasty and fight people and I think he got tired of dealing with that. One of our last conversations was about how he was thinking of changing his name back to his given name-- Jimmy Lee Lindsay Jr.-- and trying to drop everything that went along with being Jay Reatard.

Patrick Carney (The Black Keys): In early 2008, he opened a tour for us. By the second night, he had been punched out by a security guard. It just seemed like there were two Jays that were always at odds with one another. We became friends and after the tour, we would talk on the phone late at night and exchange texts. He seemed to feel like he was running out of time and that he had to get all of this music out there before that happened. We came to Memphis in September of that same year and Jay opened our show there. He was in bad shape and on the verge of some sort of breakdown or episode, which he had. He was sober and working hard on the first proper Matador album for at least six months after that.

Lindsay Shutt: Jay was trying really hard to turn his life around. He got close with his dad, who was also trying to quit drinking. He was going to AA meetings with his dad and his sister once a week. He did well at home. There was stability there. Even on tour, he was keeping it together. Seemed really hard to maintain a sober life and always be in bars every night, but he managed to do it for a while.

Stephen Pope: Most people try to say that the period Jay was "clean" was the happiest period in his life. I didn't see it this way. He was much calmer in his demeanor, but I could tell that he hated it. He spent a big part of his youth and all of his adult life partying hard. That's what he liked to do. He didn't like facing reality because he thought (and always did) that reality sucked. He also hated being bored and was a very anxious guy.

There was something about Jay that made him have some extremely obsessive and weird fans. So, even before anyone had heard of Jay Reatard he had already experienced the weirdness of semi-celebrity. There were always three or four weirdos with Reatards shirts on who would all offer us places to stay. We couldn't afford hotels early on so we always took up the offers. On several occasions the weirdos would get drunk and be confrontational to Jay about his personal past or why he "sold out." Jay of course would be confrontational back. It got to the point where we couldn't stay with people in cities anymore unless they were real friends from the past. This definitely made it harder for Jay to make any new friends that he trusted.

Photo courtesy Matador Records

Of the 100 or so releases Jay was responsible for, 99 of them were made the same way: Jay recorded it at home to his specific tastes. He would then make a certain handful of labels aware of the recording, and one of them would release it. This is how Blood Visions was made; the album primarily responsible for Jay's sharp upwards arc of exposure from 2007 until his passing. Because of this quality, Jay was in a special class within the music industry, one that included other ultra-prolific artists like Fucked Up or Robert Pollard.

The first and last full-length album Jay would make under contract, Watch Me Fall, dominated the final year-and-a-half of his life. Whether it was the writing, recording, release, promotion, or touring, Jay was no longer answering to himself. He had a deadline for a record and this presented a dynamic Jay was unaccustomed to.

Stephen Pope: Jay approached it differently because it was the first time he kind of had a deadline and it wasn't just making it for fun. We developed a few songs together as a band but they ultimately didn't make the album. Billy played drums on several tracks and I recorded bass on a few, but Jay ended up re-recording the bass parts himself. So the recording process was almost all Jay. Live we would interpret the songs differently.

Damian Abraham: I think it's a great record. There is another version of it that was recorded before the released version. It's a different session and has some unreleased songs on it. Jay said he wanted to see it come out someday because in some ways he liked it more.

Stephen Pope: I don't think it's that solid of a record. Jay didn't think so, either. I remember Jay saying that he knew it wouldn't be a "classic" but he knew the next one would be. There are some really really good songs, though. "Wounded" is an amazing pop song, but the whole record just didn't feel like an honest Jay record. Label pressure is there from the smallest indie to the biggest major. Indies function just like major labels do except on a smaller scale and with a bit more freedom. The first time Jay turned in the album Matador rejected it. They wanted to cut a few songs, have a few songs re-recorded, and they wanted Jay to write more radio-friendly songs. I think this actually happened twice, which can't be too reassuring as an artist. I don't think there would have been quite as much pressure had the advance not been so big.

Gerard Cosloy: We'd ultimately have released whatever he wanted. It wasn't so much about re-doing the record or changing the musical direction... we really wanted his long-awaited second album of new stuff (as opposed to a comp) to be received as favorably as Blood Visions, if not more so. It was more about our leaning on him to try and make the best album possible-- at no point did we ever tell him we wanted a poppier record, for instance.

Obviously we wish it had reached more people, but none of us can control how someone else responds to a record. There were practical issues that I come back to-- the album coming on the heels of two singles comps and newbies not always knowing where to start-- as opposed to, "Jay should've done this or that" differently.

Lindsay Shutt: [When instructed to re-do certain tracks on the album] He was really hurt, stressed, and upset about it. It was a shock to him. Things kind of went downhill after that. Seemed like he wasn't having fun making music at that point.